Of Philosophy at the Limit

Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental. John Sallis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. 272 pp. $49.95 h.c., 0-253-33772-0; $24.95 pbk., 0-253-21403-3.

I

John Sallis's recent work, Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental, will come to be recognized as his magnum opus. There is a dimension of philosophical autobiography in this multilayered work, a self-showing, even a propriety of sorts in the sense Sallis discusses in the text as "watchful action," and an expression of the locus that gives all of Sallis's work its "monstrosity." So much of the corpus of Sallis's work is interwoven into the fabric of this text. It is as if Sallis is drawing all of his other writings into a gathering, not under the mantel of some single concept but as if to offer perspectival views of the Sache that drives his philosophical projects, allowing these repetitions of his other works—Stone (1994), Spacings (1987), Echoes (1990), Double Truth (1995), Crossings (1991), Chorology (1999), and so forth—to circulate again in this work, thereby giving expression (an impossible expression) to the elementary sense uncovered and put into play at the limit of his thinking.

As is characteristic of so much of Sallis's thought, the force of his own work in this text occurs as a memorial expression, through a remembrance and through the recovery of originary words in the tradition, and through repeated narratives that draw out, in deepening layers, the sense of the elemental in the history of philosophy. This twisting free of his own thinking in relationship to that history, a task that has so consumed his life's work, in the end, in this magnum opus, implicates his thinking in the kind of doubling that is the force of imagination. This is a text that operates at the limit of philosophy.

At the end of his brief acknowledgments, Sallis writes of the origin of this work: "On certain occasions (in Umbria, on the Aegean islands, at the site of the temples, etc.), in such places, there comes an appeal that enlivens imagination and attests to the elemental" (2000, xii). This opening of an elemental time and place, the tem-poral and spatial site of originary manifestation, provokes in Sallis an enlivening and intensification of imagination, that is, it provokes a recovery of the force of imagination. It is this force that has made it possible for Sallis to write this book. Though experienced by Sallis as an appeal, and although it is written as an attestation to this elemental appeal, which has hitherto for the most part remained unaddressed, this work is more than a disowned, impartial witness that responds and gives expression to the elemental that somehow showed itself to him on those unique occasions and at those special sites, some of which are of nature and others of art. For the elemental is of such a character that on its own it withdraws in order to give sense to things. It shows itself of itself only in the tracing of itself, as figure and horizon, that occurs in the drawing into sensible being of what is. On its own, the self-showing of the elemental is impossible. Rather, it is the doubling that occurs in certain artistic works—and in this artistic philosophical work—that is necessary for the self-showing of the elemental. The sense of the elemental, a kind of self-showing of physis itself, requires its imaging in art, or its repetition and doubling in philosophical wonder. The latter is what occurs in Sallis's book. This reconnection of philosophy and art in the force of imagination is made explicit by Sallis toward the end of his text when he comments on the excessive, hypernatural wonder experienced by Theaetetus as the beginning of philosophy. Sallis writes: "The beginning philosopher—and presumably this beginning is something the philosopher never leaves behind...